The idea of free will is dead. Long live the NHS

Parliament smoking

I underwent stage two of my bowel surgery last week. An hour of unbearable pain; I vomited twice on the operating table. Still, it was a walk in the park compared to sitting through the Commons debate on a rolling cigarette ban two days before.

The pro-ban formula appears to be: smoking isn’t a choice, it’s an addiction, and it starts from the first cigarette. This is highly questionable. If we really are hooked from cigarette number one then nicotine must be the most dangerous substance known to man – worse than uranium – and we should not only outlaw it but napalm the state of Virginia. Yet I smoked throughout my thirties, and my experience is that you have to work pretty hard to develop a habit. The taste of fags is disgusting; it was the desire to conform that encouraged me to persevere.

As for giving up, that was an epic struggle – but I did it and millions of others have, too. If you’ve tried and failed, please try again. It is possible.

To imply, by contrast, that a single puff lands you in an inescapable prison with a lifetime sentence is to suggest that human beings are creatures of pure instinct without any reason or will, which is a demeaning vision of man and our potential. It also rejects the Christian concept that while temptation exists and we are prone to fall for it, God gave us a conscience that tells us to do better. The Western tradition – our individualism – hinges upon the principle of free will, that salvation is meaningless unless it is freely chosen. Force people to live right and they aren’t mature moral citizens. They’re sheep following orders.

Of course we’ve always had regulations, prohibitions, taboos, but until recently the mature liberal consensus was to apply these while granting as much latitude for free will as possible. Life’s a balance. St Francis de Sales advised us to be like the child that with one hand “clings to their father” – to order – and with the other “gathers blackberries along the hedges”, exercising curiosity and risk.

British MPs, alas, wouldn’t let their kiddies outdoors. I heard little theology in that awful Commons debate, hardly any philosophy; but then I never do. Why? Because we no longer teach thinking in schools. The Age of Reason has given way to the Age of Emotion, and MPs, like most voters, almost exclusively couch their arguments in anecdote and empathy. These are hard to counter. If a pro-ban advocate tells you their aunt died of lung cancer, it feels heartless to reply with a dry lecture on free will: the implication of philosophy is that you would tolerate tragedy in service to a cold abstraction.

“You don’t care, do you?” No politician wants to hear those words, particularly in today’s Labour Party. It’s interesting to note that when Parliament passed the indoor smoking ban in 2006, 49 Labourites voted against, including John Prescott, John Reid and Alan Duncan. Last week, not one of that party opposed the new legislation – George Galloway was the only socialist who did – and Wes Streeting made a vague threat to go further should he win power. No doubt he’ll be cutting down the blackberry bushes at the first opportunity.

The hyper-emotionalism of modern life casts the smallest issue, from thorn pricks to wobbly trolleys, as a catastrophe that the state must fix right now – and if one accepts that free will is indeed an illusion, then this wild expectation becomes logical. If voters are totally helpless – neither responsible for our actions nor capable of handling the results – then the government must step in to protect us.

Thus the welfare state has evolved into the therapeutic state, concerned not just with providing a safety net in the worst conditions, but a comfort blanket in all conditions. That the new smoking ban is progressive – i.e. it kicks in when you are 15 and rises every year after that – is apposite. The goal is to keep us in a state of permanent, childlike innocence.

Yet it is possible to be kind to the point of cruelty. Take the trans issue. Future historians will note that Britain not only considered allowing children to destroy their bodies, because adults thought it would be the “nice thing to do”, but also came close to banning public criticism of that procedure in order to protect people’s feelings about it.

To a reasonable person this is objectively mad, but it conforms to the hysteric’s demand that the state reduce all suffering to zero. If the individual, pleading distress, wishes to redraw their very body, then we have an obligation to try – by legislation, pill or by scalpel – to cut people free from the tyranny of nature.

Except you can’t. As I am living evidence. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I go to the gym twice a week, and yet here I am, helpless in an operating theatre. You can blame genetics for this, bequeathing me insides like a bramble patch, laced with buds that must be nipped out before they flower into tumours. It has turned me into that thing I hate most: a subject of the NHS, with diminishing freedom.

The doctor, a very good man, said “All went well. We’ll see you again in 12 months.” I’m becoming so familiar at the endoscopy unit that they might invite me to the Christmas party, which isn’t such a bad thought considering the drugs they have access to. Soon the only place we’ll be able to get high in this puritan country is at the local hospital.

Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day’s agenda from The Telegraph – direct to your inbox seven days a week.